persecuted by Saddam Hussein's regime has been left grief-stricken by her sister's death in a bombing raid on Baghdad.

Haifa Nasralla's younger sister Hannah was killed in the early days of the war during a coalition bombing raid targeting the Iraqi dictator.Hannah, 41, who leaves a two-year-old son and five other children, died on Saturday, March 20, when a bomb landed on a neighbouring house in the Dora district of the city.

Mrs Nasralla, 46, who lives in Basingstoke Road with her four children, learned of her sister's death the next day.

Since then she has been unable to contact her relatives in Iraq, who include three brothers and a sister, and does not know if they are dead or alive.

A distraught Mrs Nasralla told the Evening Post yesterday that all she can do now is pray for their safety.

She said: "I was so close to Hannah. I don't even know if she died alone or if someone from her family was with her.

"No-one can understand how I feel at the moment.

"Every night I wake up and cannot go back to sleep, so I pray and read the Koran, because it's all I have got left now."

She said: "I called Ashwaq to ask about the family but her husband answered the phone and told me she was not at home because she had gone to her mother's wake.

"I said ‘Is it Hannah? She is my sister'. He said he was sorry but she had been killed in a bombing. I was screaming so much on the phone that my daughter had to take the phone from me and put it down. Then we lost communication."

Mrs Nasralla added: "I just want to

contact my family and get some news. I don't know how they are, or if they are still alive or not.

"I see them every night in my dreams. I cannot sleep properly because I keep thinking about them."

Mrs Nasralla, who worked as an architect in Baghdad, arrived in Reading in September 2000 after fleeing Saddam Hussein's regime with her children.

She said the dictator's agents killed three of her husband's brothers.

"Our life in Iraq was hell," she said.

She said life in Reading with daughter Sarah, 15, and sons Yasser, 12, Yussef, 10 and Zait, six, was good, but her worries are for the Iraqi people.

She added: "It's terrible in Baghdad at the moment. I wish for the situation to get better there because of the people.

"The people there just want to get a good life like everyone else in the world, they don't want more."